Musings, observations, and written works from the publisher of Eckhartz Press, the media critic for the Illinois Entertainer, host of Minutia Men, and the writer of "The Living Wills", "$everance," "Just One Bad Century," "Father Knows Nothing," "The Radio Producer's Handbook," and "Records Truly Is My Middle Name"

Thursday, July 27, 2017

Now he's even lost Ken Starr

That's right, Ken Starr. The fiercely partisan Republican who led the Bill Clinton investigation. Even Ken Starr has had enough of the current president's shenanigans. In today's Washington Post, he said this...

Mr. President, please cut it out. Tweet to your heart’s content, but stop the wildly inappropriate attacks on the attorney general. An honorable man whom I have known since his days as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, Jeff Sessions has recently become your piñata in one of the most outrageous — and profoundly misguided — courses of presidential conduct I have witnessed in five decades in and around the nation’s capital. What you are doing is harmful to your presidency and inimical to our foundational commitment as a free people to the rule of law.

The attorney general is not — and cannot be — the president’s “hockey goalie,” as new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci described Sessions’s job. In fact, the president isn’t even his client. To the contrary, the attorney general’s client is ultimately “We the People,” and his fidelity has to be not to the president but to the Constitution and other laws of the United States. Indeed, the attorney general’s job, at times, is to tell the president “no” because of the supervening demands of the law. When it comes to dealing with the nation’s top legal officer, you will do well to check your Twitter weapons at the Oval Office door.